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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

If we Can, Should we?

This post is inspired by two things, one of which is my good friend Rainy. When asked what I should blog about, she said time travel theorems. The other part was inspired by the TV show The Real, on History network. For those of you who don't know it, The Real show the real version of a movie in each episode. The Real Titanic, The Real Jack The Ripper, The Real Robin Hood, etc. The episode that I watched most recently was The Real Jurassic Park.

I was always loved Jeff Goldblum's line from Jurassic Park, "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." It's very true at the rates that we are pushing scientific discovery, we will have to start thinking about this sometime soon. For instance, did you know that there has been dinosaur soft tissue discovered? Underneath the mineral of the fossil. Science doesn't have the technology required to extract the DNA from the pieces discovered yet, but it could be within our lifetimes that seeing dinosaur DNA will be viable. There are experiments being done chicken embryos, adding proteins here and there to enhance the ancestral dinosaur-ian features. Can you imagine a chicken with a tail, teeth, or claws at the end of it's wings?

What we need to look at now, with science so close to so many answers, is whether we truly want to look for know those answers. How do we decide what we should or shouldn't do? In days past, when the west was considered a Christian world, the answer would have been obvious. Now? Whose morals do we follow? Are Pagan morals better than Christian morals? I'm sure a lot of Pagans would agree. Our morals differ from Christian morals in some key ways. Does that make ours better? Or theirs better? No. Just different. What about Muslim morals? Or Hindu? Who should be able to make that decision, "No, this is wrong, we shouldn't do this." Over the past 100 years there have been incredible arguments about scientific morals. Science has taken a huge jump in the last century. Do you remember in the 1960's when there was a head transplant done on monkeys? What about cloning, and genetic manipulation? Or abortion, especially now that there have been studies done that show that fetuses have memory?

There are very fine lines here, and chances are our children will be the ones to draw them. We have such a direct impact on the future, and I think we all take that for granted. What are we teaching our kids? What should we teach our kids? How do we give them the right morals to make the correct decisions? How far is too far, or not far enough?